Could it be because the information age causes companies to compete on price much more aggressively? You can’t easily prove that your fridge really will last longer, but easy to price the price is low.
The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.
If your complaint is that this requires effort from the consumer, then that’s not something any market could fix. The consumer will always have to consider what their preferences are and how the offerings in the market align with them, if the want to end up purchasing goods/services that align with their preferences.
Household appliances are textbook examples of adoption s-curves, and in different phases, different rules apply for the market. Especially in the last phase of the s-curve, those manufacturers are hurt the most which build lasting products, because their own past customers, usually the best source for new purchases from their brand, don't buy from them any more because the need is still met by the still working product. So they either go bankrupt or get bought by one of the manufacturers that put in planned obsolescence and got tons of money from that, or they change their strategy before that happens.
That complaint is immature and entirely self-interested. It’s almost always beneficial (except when there’s production shortages) to have a preference that is shared by large segments of the market. It’s not the systems fault if few people share your preferences.
That's a bit rich for you to write -> this thread is addressing a practical problem with consumer goods, and your post is a theoretical, spherical car in a vacuum description of how ideal market should work, and falls apart in the real world.
If the model worked perfectly, we would never have problems with slave labour in supply chains because ~0% of consumers are willing to buy them. The fact that we do, indicated that consumers are not able to enforce their preferences, for example because companies lie with no consequences. And if they can lie about slave labour, then they can lie about anything else.
The problem of selecting for quality is exactly what I am talking about, and it is very simple to accomplish. I do it myself routinely, so I know that it takes a bit more than 0 effort, but it is a very simple problem to manage, and anybody can do it. The actual immature complaint is that not enough people have the same preferences as you do. Which you just have to get over, and accept that you live on a planet with 7 billion other people, and a lot of them (no matter what they say), actually don’t care about a little bit of slave labor in the supply chain of their new TV.
So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?
What is the basis for this extraordinary claim?
So far your argument reads a lot like 'market is infalliable, if it doeant serve your needs, its your fault. And even if you find it ever fails, it's your, the consumers fault too. No flaw in the system is possible'
I’m not saying they want anything. I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices and not how they might answer any particular question when prompted. In economics this is called a revealed preference.
You still have not addressed how does this square with lying.
What should happen when I ask primark staff and they say 'there is no slave labour'?
Is it also my responsibility to fly to Taiwan, break into the factory and defeat their security in a shootout, to find out that thwy use slave labour?
At least I hope the state won't protect primarc in case I want to make sure they are not lying before I buy a t-shirt?
That’s just regular fraud. It’s already illegal.
Given you don't have details on the quality of the item you are buying how do you accomplish that?
Doesn't this neglect word of mouth? If you ask someone on HN, they will tell you to buy your vacuum cleaners and dishwashers from Miele and your washers and dryers from Speed Queen, budget permitting.
To the extent that scales to the world at large, the quality manufacturers will take business away from their competitors who don't get recommended as often.
Consumers signal their preference for quality all the time. By buying the pricier stuff. But sometimes, somehow, there's no option anymore to buy X stuff - try buying a desktop CPU without Intel ME or AMD PSP for example. They just put it in every one of the CPUs at one point and that was that. People are not going to not buy newer CPUs.
We just need a kitchenware company that takes the quality mantle and seriously maintains it over the course of 40 years. I bet it’s a niche that would actually work if someone tried it. You just have to keep the MBAs out of the company somehow.
I totally support your mission. I'm writing this on an 8-year-old Mac that I hope to eke out a full decade from. I just don't think iPhones (or Macs, really -- mine already can't run the newest OS, and its Safari can't display WebP images that are popping up increasingly across the Web) are a good example.
I've been a consumer my whole life, and I still struggle to "make my decisions accordingly" because it's so difficult to find trustworthy information about quality, especially the qualities that matter to me. It can take an exhaustingly long time to gather this information, there are no shortcuts, and price and quality are often only loosely correlated.
Worse, after putting in the effort, I frequently find that those high-quality products and their makers disappear from the market, being outcompeted by junk.
Nobody makes high quality cassette tape mechanisms. It doesn't make sense to make ten of a custom cassette tape mechanism, only at least tens of thousands, so, they don't. But the market for thousands of these mechanisms is for the cheapest possible not good quality. So you simply can't buy good quality.
It was possible in the 1980s, at great expense, for the humble cassette tape to sound pretty good, the Nakamichi Dragon is the most famous high end tape deck.
But you can't do that today. There are a handful of Chinese manufacturers, spitting out variations on the same basic cheapest possible "eh, it's good enough" mechanism and that's the entire market.
I wonder if the reverse could be done-- using the heads that are still (likely) in production for use in card readers, then using some DSP magic to reconstruct a decent audio product?
No thermostatic control, but the defaults are fine for my uses.
Currently on year 10. The power button got a little finicky so I have to wedge it with a piece of cardboard to make contact, but otherwise as good as the day I bought it.
"The market" is not a single thing. It's an idea(ology) from economics, and a cultural mythology, that vaguely intersect at some point.
We all think we know what "The Market" is, supply, demand, competition and so on. It's existence and operation underwrites many a political argument.
Then there is the reality:
Walk in to a supermarket and "choose" from 20 different brands of tinned vegetable, grown in the same region, processed in a handful of factories ultimately owned by the same parent company.
"Own" a movie, on a device that you don't actually control in any way, that you were effectively forced to purchase, with money you don't have.
And so on....
So, in respectful mockery of Thatcher I say "There's no such thing as The Market" - not because I don't believe in the values of property, choice, competition, innovation.... but because we don't have these, and haven't for some time. The myth of "The Market" lives on the place of early (real) capitalism as we head toward "consumer communism".
There is no need to do anything "respectfully" of Thatcher. She should have been hanged.
I wouldn't piss on her grave for fear the warmth would comfort her.
>"The market" is not a single thing.
Who seriously think it is? I think most people here knows that "the market" doesn't refer to an actual thing or place, just like "the internet" doesn't refer to an actual actual thing or place.
Nobody. I'm not implying anyone is that stupid. It's obviously a figure of speech. Which you get, right?
For your supermarket example, instead of going there you could go to a local farmer's market for those vegetables. It might cost more, but most expect higher quality there than at the supermarket. So there is another "market" option, you shouldn't just expect all your "market" options to be placed in convenient aisles at the grocery store.
If you live in the city and have to drive over an hour to get to a farmer's market, well that was also a choice you made. Perhaps you didn't make that choice because you wanted to be away from locally grown produce, but the supermarket being your only option is a consequence of that choice.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, just trying to point out that much of the choices we make will reduce the other choices we have and we should be conscious of the ones that drive us to become mindless consumers and remove other options from us in the market.
Nicely put. I see that sort of "choice affecting choices" you describe leveraged/manipulated a lot in tech, to "funnel" people into worlds with ever smaller horizons. Every product has an inbuilt con or trick that seems out to get you. It's essence is anti-choice masquerading as forms of economic freedom.
How to remain conscious of that? It's tiring. Like being in a jungle surrounded by predators.
Having bought a toaster and electric kettle recently, I completely agree with your main point: buy the cheapest one you can bear to look at, because they're all the same in the essentials.
But this anecdote about your aside might be diverting. One of my earliest extended memories (in the 1960s) is watching my dad repair our toaster. winding new resistance wire around the mica central divider. (The toaster was a manual model with flip-open sides, toasting one side of the bread at a time.)
I don't think automatic toasters were all that cheap in the 1960s. Not everywhere, anyway, if repair of a manual toaster was worthwhile to do.
I'm not so sure about that. In my experience people tend to be less price sensitive with household appliances (big one time purchases that are supposed to last long) than they are with other more expensive items. Most people I know tend to be lifelong customers if they have good experiences with a specific brand and are very willing to share that brand as a recommendation.
The problem is, those good experiences don't seem to hold true anymore. Price hasn't been a good indicator for product quality and life expectancy for a while. I've seen this first hand with my family. My parents were very willing to spend significant amounts on stuff like dishwashers, fridges, or washing machines. Despite sticking to the brands they had good experiences with, the product lifetime decreased with every new product purchase. It has come to the point that they don't care for the brand they used to trust, they are just buying the stuff thats cheap and checks all the boxes.
These companies seem to have traded high customer loyalty (and possibly a very efficient organic marketing channel) for more frequent sales but higher price competition. I have no insights into those companies, but I'm not sure if that was an intelligent long term play.
Newer refridgerators with fancy water faucets and computers and locks have failed in the time I've had it.
Had a washer blow out on a computer control board; $750 for the board.
A similar washer blew out on the dial, $35 for the dial.
However, some manufacturers like Saab actually delivered all this with excellent reliability only to be rejected by the US market and driven into the ground by General Motors. What is a quality manufacturer to do?
Similar story with old Honda’s. Simple cars that just worked with few problems, but they were simple cars with few electrical motors and digital features.
However, some manufacturers like Saab actually delivered all this with excellent reliability
If you mean older Saabs, well the two stroke stuff has its own set of problems. They're neat cars but were just different enough to make it difficult to find a competent mechanic. Saab already had one foot in the grave by the time GM bought them.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Feds-investigate-Saab-90...
"Whirlpool brands include Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, Norge, Roper, and others. See all items in Dishwasher Dishrack. Whirlpool also makes various appliance models for Sears / Kenmore."
And once you start looking up part numbers you realize it goes even further.
E.g. the majority of consumer grade ice machines on Amazon (at least in the UK) uses a mechanism that is near identical. This extends to mostly copying a design flaw: Most of them a compartment used to immerse cooled metal rods in water, which then rotates out of the way to let the ice cubes fall into the ice compartment when done. Most of these are made out of plastic, with a motor rotating only one side. Problem is when it's stopped mechanically by simply hitting the end of the range of motion, which means the motor effectively ends up trying to twist the compartment. This works fine for casual use - the plastics holds for a while. But use it enough, and you get cracks developing. It's trivial to fix - some of the designs have an optical diode to stop rotation in one direction, but weirdly not in the other, and doing that in both directions would solve it
But I'm thinking that apart from not just coming up in testing (it takes a lot of cycles before it breaks), a lot of these problems spread because of cost cutting in the product development phase. It's a pretty obvious flaw if you observe the above mechanisms, and while you can cut a few cents of the bill of materials, without extensive testing you won't know for sure that it won't fail within the warranty window (they do if you use them as heavily as I use mine) and it doesn't take a very high failure rate to make an extra optical diode and wiring worth it. If people did product dev from scratch you'd expect at least some of them to decide it'd be worth it, but almost all of these are clearly just blindly copied designs (I'm sure multiple models must also be manufactured on spec by the same manufacturer).
As a result there's little real competition, and few customers will be aware there are better alternatives, especially because it takes quite a bit of wear and tear and so most people don't shop for these types of products often enough to realistically compare, and as you point out it's hard to prove (and takes a long time to develop a reputation).
Yeah you can, it's called warranty